Archetypal reporter and daring escaper
ALAN MACKAY, who has died at the age of 87, was the archetypal newspaper district man, working in Fife for 40 years for the Daily Record and Scottish Daily Express, before setting up his own Fife Press Agency.
Few knew about his heroic exploits in the Second World War. As an RAF pilot he was shot down in North Africa, taken prisoner and sent to PoW camps in Poland.
There Alan — who had worked for the D C Thomson group in Dundee — produced his own paper, The Daily Recco, posted on notice boards until the Germans banned it. He kept it going, hiding the paper in mattresses and under floorboards, until the war neared its end. As the Nazis marched the prisoners west ahead of the Russian advance, he and two others slipped their escort, stole a German staff car and drove it through the Allied lines, to Brussels, and safety.
He published his adventures in a book, 313 Days to Christmas.
Alan Hunter